So Far Away
by Caelan
Summary: Following the events of Panacea, Liz realizes that a piece of Max remains despite his death, a part that Khivar is desperate to have. (Khivar Liz)
1. Default Chapter

Title: So Far Away

Rating: Mature

Coupling: UC (Khivar/Liz)

Warning: Character death

Summary: taken from Guilty Pleasure Fanfic challenge. Picking up from Panacea, Liz discovers that Max may be gone, but a part of him remains with her, a part that Khivar will risk anything to take.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

He was by nature a watcher, a planner, called methodical by his supporters, and labeled cold hearted by his enemies. But he worried about neither. Navigating around press and gossip would forever be a trick of his trade, he mused taking another puff of his cigarette. His eyes entranced by the fiery halo of the Antarian royal seal surrounding the young woman in front of him . So magnificent were the play of colors, custom long engrained in his bones caused his right knee to touch the ground briefly in a bow before the need that had driven him for nearly half a century returned altering the beauty before him into a mockery that he would undo.

With the slightest of pressures he could snap her neck. Her powers would offer her a measly defense at best. Yet, all the same, he felt terrified of what this small human woman embodied.

No, he amended quickly. He was not terrified. Khivar Antari, the Supreme Ruler, of nearly four billion would never be terrified of a woman. 

If one really wanted to get down to it, change terrified him. He knew of her capricious nature and how she could seduce her listener with the sweetest of dreams and then leave them stranded and alone in the harshest of realities. Things forever moved. Hadn't his rise to power been the apex of such an event? He had been the agent of change. It bothered him immensely to believe his patroness had left him for another, or maybe she had never belonged to him at all he thought inhaling the bitter nicotine and ignoring the slight tremor of his hand.

Chance dictated that he would find the royalists labs' three days too late. From his failure, his nemesis had been reborn millions of light years away forcing him into passivity. There was never any doubt in his mind that Zan would return in some form or another to take back want chance had bestowed upon him. Story after story had sprung to life about their climatic final battle. He knew the ending, knew with a crystal clear certainty that he would grind his enemy into a pile of nothingness.

Story over.

There would be no second chances. However, chance was without a sense of irony. He had imagined fighting Zan, not his woman.

"Is someone there?" her hoarse voice asked. From his vantage point, he could see the tear tracks on her sunken cheeks.

'Yeah, Liz. Your worst nightmare,' he wanted to answer. But, he needed time to adjust and learn about his newest enemy.

Hugging her arms to her chest, her eyes made another sweep over the erect stone marker. A look of almost stupid disbelief began to take root in them.

He clinched his fists at his side while startling need shot through them.

Where was that stupid boy? Rath seemed to be even more inept in this life than he was in the last. You never left a grieving woman by herself. 

"I should have been here," Liz whispered to the cool granite.

No, he could not drudge that up again. Some things needed to be forgotten.

_"Vilandra, look at me." _

"Everything was just so out of control. I need order, rules. I'm a scientist after all. What is science without rules?" She lovingly caressed the stone. "I'm just making excuses. "I left, because I was hurt. Now, it doesn't even matter. I'm alive because of you, and you're dead because of me."

He shut his eyes.

_"Why did you do this?" Frantically, he wrapped a towel around her bleeding wrists. Why couldn't he have been a healer? Because, you killed the healer a little voice in his head answered. "Why?" he kept repeating over and over as his mind struggled to process her prone figure and the blood that kept dripping despite his best efforts. _

Liz wiped her nose and made a sniffling noise. Carefully, she placed her palm on the front of the stone. "Can you ever forgive me Max? I need you to."

_"Khivar, he's a charlatan. He's feeding on your grief and nothing more."_

Angrily, he spun around to his sister and gave her one of his best glares. It was a look that brought kings blubbering to their feet, but his sister did not budge. 

"The dead don't talk to the living Vari.. Vilandra's gone."

"Max, please," she begged her heart literally breaking at her lover's silence while he felt something break again right along with her deep within the recesses of his own being. 

Later, he would spend countless hours wondering why he did it. He liked to tell himself his motivations had been purely tactical, but a part sensed it even then. They shared a kinship, one strangely enough he did not want to break. In that moment, snapping her neck was no longer an option.

With his mind, he reached out to the frigid air surrounding the grave marker. It took the smallest of pulses to speed the sleepy particles up. Moving faster and faster, the warmth seeped up into the stone.

Slowly, she lifted her head up. "Max," tumbled from her lips a sonar embodiment of her pain, her love and everything else in between. 

Turning his back to her, he made his way past the numerous tombstones. He had enough of ghosts and memories for today. He would give Liz Parker her day to mourn, his gift from one mourner to the next. A predatory smile spread across his lips, but tomorrow would be an entirely different scenario. He had come to this planet to finish this and finish this he would.


	2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

She should feel sad, devastated and even angry, but instead Liz Parker felt none of those things. She felt no need to corner Michael and learn what had happened to Max until she could recite every detail from memory. No, she had displayed little or no interest in the incident, as Meta Chem was now calling it, or even the cover story the Sheriff and the others had concocted. What was the story again? She shook her head. She honestly couldn't remember, because in the end it didn't matter. It wasn't going to change the simple fact that she still felt nothing, but that hadn't always been entirely the case. She thought as her cold fingers began the steady trek up her middle furiously pushing buttons inside of their holes to cover it up as fast as she could.

In the beginning, there had been fear. For hours after Max confided in her the truth, her brain had been on a loop. He was an alien. That's nonsense her rational side had chimed in, ' aliens didn't exist,' but one did. He thought she was beautiful. It was laughable that with that one little glimpse. She had fallen so hard. She had forgotten one important little thing.

He was an alien.

She wasn't.

There had been more feelings. She had felt them all. Love in the way he used to play with the edges of her hair. Lust in the way he grabbed her and slammed her down on the Crashdown counter. She would never forget the look in his eyes or the feeling of his hands creeping dangerous past the hem of her skirt.

Her fingers stopped in their work as she noticed a missed button. Warily, she pulled on the fabric releasing all the buttons from their holes and just stared at the sight before her.

Hurt still knifed its way through her as she recalled him kissing his 'alien' in the rain. She had just stood there and watched as his hands cupped Tess' face the same way he had always done with her. She had chosen the same inaction as she listened to his mother announce that Tess was his alien leaving her to be what exactly? In all her infinite wisdom, Liz hadn't waited around for an explanation, because at that moment the truth had stared her right in the face.

He was an alien.

She wasn't.

Her eyes drifted down to the sight just above her breasts. The joys of hindsight she thought stretching her hand over her tummy ignoring the green glow that emanated through the splits of her fingers.

She had come back from Florida a little bit older, and little more jaded. She had given up, but he hadn't. He wouldn't, but he had to. It's what his walking, talking older version had taken so many pains to get her to see, right? To rip both of their hearts out to save the world, she placed her hand over eyes as the ache in her head intensified.

She should have told him to get lost. No, her lips twitched upwards. She had a myriad of expletives now at her disposal she liked to use on him first, but there would be no verbal unleashing. He had left her, her harbinger of doom encased in the body she loved.

Together, they turned something with the potential to be beautiful into something twisted and soiled. At that thought, a deadly heat uncurled inside of her.

Caution railed on her to stop, but she was tired of being cautious. Caution had cost her everything. Tess had never been cautious sailing into Roswell and telling her true motives to anyone she could get to listen, but Tess was his alien wife. The woman he touched in a way he would never touch her. A woman who now carried a part of him inside of her that could even be a living breathing entity by now for all that Liz knew.

Yet thousands of miles away, the sometimes human Lizzie Parker had sprung up from her bed screaming as the presence of her fallen lover surged through a connection she had thought had withered and died along with everything else. Had she imagined the whole thing? The play of his hands against her face or the soft tingling that had passed into her from the butterfly kiss he pressed against her lips.

Oh, how she wanted to believe in him and in them. She thought staring down at her chest, but there was just one glaring question that kept getting in the way. One whose explanation had made even less sense to her when he have given it some months ago.

"_I wanted to be with someone who was like me." _

"Then why did you pick me?" she whispered not having received her answer from her visit to the cemetery.

Instead, a single green spark slithered out from her fingertips slamming into the wall and an object unseen by her. With a mixture of shock and horror, the answer to her question started to take shape. For the first time, she allowed herself to acknowledge the royal seal of Antar glowing where Max Evans' silver hand print had once been. She was finally one of them with the death of the one she had wanted to be an alien for.

Sighing, she finished with her shirt and tucked her wisps of hair back into her bun. Dropping two hair clips, she spun around and tried to scream. For there, lying face down in a pool of gray blood was a silver bodied monster while another crouched over its body.

Holding her hands up, she backed up as the second creature advanced on her on all fours.


	3. Chapter Three

Chapter Three:

Moments of life marked off in noise surrounded him from the chatter of children playing with a ball below him to the very overzealous neighbors' bed springs next door. Yet, at this stage in his life, it was the harsh voices engaged in a love's quarrel on the other side of him that held the most importance. Passing through the thin walls of his cheap hotel room, he ignored all of it, well most of it. The sickening noise of flesh colliding into flesh still made his stomach churn. Perhaps, the peculiar results of some lingering empathy left over from his boyhood days.

Frowning, he turned away from the argument squashing his cigarette ruthlessly into the ash tray. He had to stop doing this he ordered himself with each push of his butt against the glass. However, all the commands in the world could not stop his hand from moving to cover his cheek against a remembered pain that time had done nothing to dull.

_For what seemed like seconds, they stared at each other. _

_Devoted lovers and partners no more. _

_Tears filled her indigo eyes, which was not an uncommon sight for him as of late. _

_He still felt the burning imprint of her hand on his face as the plate of food wobbled in his grasp. This had not been his intention at all. _

_She lowered her gaze from his and tried to withdraw her hand. _

_He stopped her. _

"_No one was supposed to get hurt. You promised me Vari." _

_After days of not speaking, her voice sounded raw to his own ears. _

"_I loved them. They were my family." She shuddered. _

_If they were her family, then what was he? Her dirty little secret, his pride answered. _

_Hurt and anger seeped into one moment of thoughtlessness. He opened his mouth to speak. _

_Vilandra's face blanched but that was soon lost in the flurry of movement as she ran from him. _

If he had only known, he would have run after her. Moodily, his eyes drifted back to their current study of the water spot forming along the ceiling. A putrid brown orb of sewage surround by a faint caramel halo, he could almost deem attractive. Filth cloaked in the guise of beauty. He thought bitterly to himself. In the beginning, all that was new carried such a gloss.

_When she had appeared in his doorway back from school, four inches taller clothed in the red satin of nobility that seemed so out of place in the slum her people had put him in, he knew something had changed. _

_When she had talked his ear off about trivial and inane things, the product of her schooling, he had mourned for the spirited young girl who had found fault with the wealth and power she had been born into. His friend was no more. _

_When her small hand shook every so slightly as it journeyed down his cheek in a gesture of good bye no different from a hundred of its predecessors. Except this time, a warmth uncurled in his belly at her contact. Alarmed, he jerked back from her caress, because this was one change he hadn't anticipated. _

"_It's okay you know." She breathed eliminating the space between him, so he could feel her harden breasts pressing up against his chest. _

"_What are you doing?" _

"_What I've been wanting to do ever since I was seven years old," she answered standing up on her tip toes, but in her nervousness her mouth connected just below his mouth._

"_Lonnie, this is…" he made the mistake of lowering his head._

_She didn't miss the second time, but that was only because he didn't want her to. _

"No." Needing to be closer to the water spot, to remind himself of the fact that everything fades yet again, he felt himself rise off the bed and float up to the offending spot. "This is how it is."

"Here mom and dad always thought I was the weird one."

Looking down, he saw the shimmering astral protection of his sister. "You are supposed to be watching things while I'm gone Deva. Not spying on me," he growled while doing everything possible to keep from looking at the newborn in her arms.

"You were supposed to be back with the seal three days ago Vari. Oh, yes do give me your evil look of diabolic torture. You know how much that scares me. Is there a reason you picked this pig sty to stay in? I mean look at this bed spread. Who knows when was the last time they washed this?"

"Did you come down here to nag at me, or does your visit have a purpose?"

As if winding down some long established routine, Deva's voice changed from the combative to the serious. "The senators are getting restless. They're starting to question while they should follow your authority at all. The papers are all blaring rubbish about Zan's miraculous return day and night."

He snorted.

"You've found Max, haven't you?"

"That's one way of looking at it." His eyes finally straying to the bundle in his sister's arms. "Put the baby down Deva."

He didn't miss the dilation of her pupils or her tightened grasp. "What's wrong? Is Tess behaving herself?"

"I can handle Tess. The question is can you handle Max?"

"It doesn't appear that he's not going to take much handling after all," he answered deciding not to call her out on her obvious change in subject. "He's dead."

From the crook of her arm, he watched two indigo eyes open along with a small mouth followed by a mournful wail.

"Shh, it's okay little one." Deva cooed holding the baby up to her shoulder. "Who?"

"Humans."

"Humans, you're kidding me."

"Wish I was," he answered lowering himself back down to the floor trying to escape the sounds coming from the newest addition to their very happy club of mourners. "Will you shut that thing up already?"

"Infants can't be really reasoned with Vari. I don't understand though," she answered patting the baby's back and restoring the pink blanket around its kicking feet. "If Max's dead, who has the seal? Why didn't Tess feel Max die?"

"Because Tess isn't as closely linked to the situation as she would have us believe."

"Liz."

"Liz," he repeated hating the uncharacteristic feeling her name evoked in him never

seeing the glimpse of a smirk on his sister's lips or noticing the sudden cessation in the baby's crying.

"So tell me about Liz? I'm guessing she's not five hundred pounds and bucked tooth as Tess would describe her."

"No, she's tiny. Her eyes remind me of Telusian marble," he answered absentmindedly. "Even though, she's hurting. She goes out of her way to make sure that Rath and Vila--Isabel are okay. She has a very big heart that way."

"Oh really."

"It's not like that."

"You're in a holding position for a reason Vari. Do you think should could be reasoned with? Does she even know she has it?"

"It's hard to say. Her grief is clouding every impression I get from her." He frowned at the slight shaking of his hand before stuffing it into his pocket. This was the last thing he needed right now. "She's just like this force. I see her. I start thinking. The woman has to be playing with my head. I will deal with her the way I deal with anyone else," he growled spurned on by his anger but more by his fear.

"Because, you thinking is such a bad thing?"

"Deva please."

"Whatever you do, I'll support you."

Reaching out for her hand, his fingers pierced right through her shimmering figure. "I know you will." He frowned at the lack…. of well life coming from outside.

"What?"

"Where are you?"

"The cottage."

"Leave. You take the thalan. You lose yourself and the baby."

"I'm your envoy. What is it going to look like…"

"I don't really care what it looks like." Parting the curtains, he easily made out the tell tale silver footprints making there way up the stairs.

"Shieter," he heard Deva curse from behind him. With a quick glance over his shoulder, he watched as a green shield shot out from the baby and surrounded his sister.

"I'm thinking this isn't a good thing."

He didn't answer as he was too caught up in the last time he had seen a shield of that identical color.

"You need to get the hell out of there." He finally said speaking to an empty room now devoid of his sister's projection. "Vilandra protect them please," he begged as he readied himself for the assault. As the multi mouth creature came crashing through the window, he found himself appealing to Max Evans' aid as well.


End file.
